The Squirrel Cage

The Squirrel-Cage is the story of Lydia Emery, a brilliant young woman from a conventional upper-middle-class family, who allows herself to be steered into marriage with Paul Hollister, an ambitious but tiresome businessman, despite the fact that she is in love with Daniel Rankin, a revolutionary, idealistic cabinetmaker. The novel captures the trapped feeling of many married women of the early twentieth century, but it is flawed by an easy solution, a dynamo accident which leaves Lydia a widow.